The 'Letter' Distribution in the Chinese Language
This work offers incremental evidence for linguistic consistency across different writing systems, relevant to researchers in linguistics and corpus analysis.
The study investigated whether Chinese ideogram writing follows the same statistical frequency distribution patterns as alphabetic languages by analyzing basic particles (characters, strokes, constructive parts) across historical periods from the Tang Dynasty to the present. It found that the distribution of Chinese constructive parts is consistent with that of alphabetic languages, providing evidence for cross-linguistic consistency.
Corpus-based statistical analysis plays a significant role in linguistic research, and ample evidence has shown that different languages exhibit some common laws. Studies have found that letters in some alphabetic writing languages have strikingly similar statistical usage frequency distributions. Does this hold for Chinese, which employs ideogram writing? We obtained letter frequency data of some alphabetic writing languages and found the common law of the letter distributions. In addition, we collected Chinese literature corpora for different historical periods from the Tang Dynasty to the present, and we dismantled the Chinese written language into three kinds of basic particles: characters, strokes and constructive parts. The results of the statistical analysis showed that, in different historical periods, the intensity of the use of basic particles in Chinese writing varied, but the form of the distribution was consistent. In particular, the distributions of the Chinese constructive parts are certainly consistent with those alphabetic writing languages. This study provides new evidence of the consistency of human languages.